Oliver & Company - Production

Production

The working title of the film during production was Oliver and the Dodger. The film pre-dated the Disney Renaissance. The original central braintrust of Disney animators, the "Nine Old Men", had retired in the early 1980s, which signaled the entrance for the next generation of Disney animators, including Oliver & Company supervising animators Glen Keane, Ruben A. Aquino, Mike Gabriel, Hendel Butoy, and Mark Henn. At a certain point, this film was to be a sequel to The Rescuers. If this had happened, it would have given the character of Penny more development, showing her living her new life in New York City with Georgette, as well as her new adoptive parents. This idea was eventually scrapped and later shelved because the producers had then felt that the story would not have been convincing.

This was the first Disney film to make heavy use of computer animation, since previous films The Black Cauldron (1985) and The Great Mouse Detective (1986) used it only for special sequences. The CGI effects were used for making the skyscrapers, the cars, trains, Fagin's scooter-cart and the climactic Subway chase. It was also the first Disney film to have a department created specifically for computer animation.

This was a test run film before The Walt Disney Company would fully commit to returning to a musical format for their animated films; Oliver & Company was the first such film to be a musical since The Fox and the Hound (1981). For the next decade, all of Walt Disney Feature Animation's films, starting with The Little Mermaid (1989), were also musicals, except for The Rescuers Down Under (1990).

Oliver & Company was one of the first animated Disney films to introduce new sound effects for regular use, to replace many of their original classic sounds, which would be used occasionally in later Disney films. However, The Little Mermaid introduced even more new sound effects. The new sound effects were first introduced with The Black Cauldron, while The Great Mouse Detective released a year after the previous film used the classic Disney SFX. This included some sounds such as the then fifty-year-old Castle thunder and the classic Goofy holler. However, the Disney television animation studio continued extensively using the classic Disney sound effects for several years, while the feature animation studio retired the original sound effects.

Oliver & Company was the first animated Disney film to include real world advertised products. Many placements of real product names Coca-Cola, USA Today, Sony, and Ryder Truck Rental were some of the most used examples. It was said on ABC's The Wonderful World of Disney that this was for realism, was not paid product placement, and that it would not be New York City without advertising.

Certain animal characters from previous Disney films make cameos in Oliver & Company. When Dodger sings "Why Should I Worry?" in the beginning of the film, some of the dogs shown are Peg, Jock, and Trusty from Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Pongo from One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).